Meaning gained versus meaning lost: The effects of meaning salience on anxiety and depression during the coronavirus pandemic

People who have meaningful lives generally experience less anxiety and depression. Meaning salience, or the awareness of the meaning in one's life, is believed to partially explain this relationship. However, in times of isolation, what might be most salient to people are the meaningful aspects of their lives that have disappeared. This study seeks to understand how making gained versus lost meaning salient affects anxiety and depression. Participants either wrote for 5 minutes about how their life gained meaning (n = 29) or lost meaning (n = 30) due to the coronavirus restrictions, or about music (i.e., the control condition; n = 32). Those who wrote about gained meaning experienced less momentary anxiety than those who wrote about lost meaning. In addition, meaning salience moderated the relationship between meaning and both anxiety and depression. Those who wrote about gained meaning appeared to exhibit a positive relationship between meaning in life (MIL) and both anxiety and depression, while those who wrote about lost meaning exhibited negative relationships. In all, this suggests that meaning salience is not always positive and that researchers and practitioners should consider how making positive meaning salient may be more beneficial than a general focus on MIL.     

Who can spot a potential problem gambler? Testing “it takes one to know one” and acquaintanceship effects in a university student population

How easy is it for individuals to detect low to moderate levels of problem gambling tendencies in others? Are individuals who have problem gambling tendencies themselves, or are close relationship partners, more accurate judges? We examine these questions in two studies involving a total of 336 interacting dyads drawn largely from a university student population. In Study 1 all pairs were strangers, whereas in Study 2 approximately half of the pairs were close. After the “judge” observed the “target” complete a gambling task, the dyad had a face-to-face discussion, with topics including favorite pastimes and personal weaknesses. Judges estimated the target's problem gambling tendencies, and both judges and targets self-reported their own gambling tendencies. There was evidence of modest, albeit somewhat inconsistent, accuracy in individuals’ judgments of the other person's problem gambling tendencies, but no “it takes one to know one” or acquaintanceship effects were apparent. Results also indicated that judges evidenced a projection bias, whereby they saw the target as similar to themselves, especially within close pairs. These results reveal that even after minimal interaction with a stranger individuals can be able to judge the person's gambling tendencies with some accuracy. At the same time, our findings indicating that close others and those with problem gambling tendencies themselves are not more or less tuned in to the early signs of a problem than anyone else suggest that it would be inappropriate to be especially convinced by—or skeptical of—these individuals’ judgments.     

Evaluation of the Self-Report Inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits in a Sample of Urban Middle School Students: a Multidimensional Rasch Analysis

Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment - Callous-Unemotional (CU) traits are characterized by limited empathy, lack of guilt, and callous use of others. The Inventory of Callous...     

Changing the means of managerial work: effects of automated decision support systems on personnel selection tasks

Journal of Business and Psychology - To enhance the quality and efficiency of information processing and decision-making, automation based on artificial intelligence and machine learning has...     

Raising the graduation bar for the schools: expectations vs outcomes.

Educational reform is an ongoing concern of parents, educators, policy makers, and the public at large. The past 50 years have ushered in a new era of reform, whose major objective was to improve students' performance based on the use of statewide standardized testing and changes in graduation requirements. This study examined one such reform movement, initially developed during the late 1970s, which developed minimum competency testing standards as well as increased course demands to specify graduation requirements for public high school students. The outcomes for this reform model, both in terms of students' achievement and failure, did not meet expectations.     

Sit Still and Pay Attention?

Sitting still while trying to pay attention implicitly reinforces the idea that to pay attention one should focus on a single aspect of the stimulus. Movement encourages attending to different aspects of the stimulus and as such is hypothesized to increase attention. We tested this with students from a traditional and a nontraditional school. Students were asked to observe and recall landmarks on a map. Students from the traditional school who viewed the map from multiple perspectives remembered more landmarks and locations than students who viewed the map from a single perspective. Students from a nontraditional school who are accustomed to movement while learning, did not show this effect. The experiment is discussed in terms of mindfulness theory.     

Learning to Reach by Constraining the Movement Search Space

Trial‐and‐error learning strategies play a central role in sensorimotor development during early infancy. However, learning to reach by trial‐and‐error normally requires a slow and laborious search through the space of possible movements. We propose a computational model of reaching based on the notion that early sensorimotor control is driven by the generation of exploratory movements, followed by the selection and maintenance of adaptive movement patterns. We find that, instead of exhaustively exploring the full search space of movement patterns, the model exploits several emergent constraints that limit the initial size of the movement search space. These constraints exploit both mechanical and kinematic properties of the reaching task. We relate these results to the development of reaching during infancy, and discuss recent findings that have identified similar constraints in young infants.     

Mindful Learning

Mindfulness, achieved without meditation, is discussed with particular reference to learning. Being mindful is the simple act of drawing noveldistinctions. It leads us to greater sensitivity to context and perspective, and ultimately to greater control over our lives. When we engage in mindfullearning, we avoid forming mind-sets that unnecessarily limit us. Many of our beliefs about learning are mind-sets that have been mindlessly accepted to be true. Consideration is given to some of the consequences that result from a mindful reconsideration of these myths of learning.     

The Effect of Mindfulness on Heart Rate Control

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that mindful attention to change regarding heart rate (HR) would result in greater control over HR. Experimental groups monitored the changing or stable nature of HR, respectively. All participants’ HR slowed during the decrease phase. Participants whose attention was directed to the stable nature of HR performed the worst on the increase phase of the HR control task. These results suggest that mindfulness, instantiated here as attention to variability, is a means to increasing control.